Sunday, April 23, 2017

Dancing in the Streets

Overnight Games Workshop made the announcement that Warhammer 40k was going to a new edition. More importantly they provided some detail as to what can be expected.

Effectively, 40k will receive the Age of Sigmar treatment. As GW used to say "This is Great News".

After five editions in the current format, the level of bloat set new levels on the corpulence scale. Earlier this year I tried playing the game but the amount of extraneous detail included in the ruleset slowed the game to a crawl. The need for, even experienced players, to have to check the rules and codexes pretty much every turn suggests a ruleset struggling under the weight of bolt-on after bolt-on.

So what have GW said?

Three ways to play - sound familiar?

Free rules

All models including FW can be used

Codexes invalidated - watch the rush to eBay

Points values included

Three Factions - Imperium, Chaos, Xenos

This pretty much suggest Warscrolls under another name - I'm guessing Datasheets.

We are like so see other AoS mechanisms. I'm guessing that Armour will go and vehicles will get wounds. Also expect that we'll see the simplified to hit to wound rules but with weapon modifiers.

I'm very happy about this announcement as due to the bloat the game was slow and plagued by situations where there are unintended consequences. The ability to layer rules from different books written over a period of up to 10 years was silly.

A cleaner Rules skeleton with a reset of unit rules will make the game both more attractive and more accessible.